Cinder is the new name for the Calliope Workshop, hosted by Taliesin Nexus in Los Angeles, California. I wrote about my experience at the workshop here.It was, in a word, transformative.

In addition to lectures on the nuts and bolts of writing like point of view, there’ll be mentoring sessions focusing on your work and talks by industry experts on self-publishing vs. trad-pub, writers and social media, the all-important Amazon algorithm, and more.

If themes like individual liberty, freedom of speech, and freedom of conscience are important to you and your writing, the Cinder Workshop is the place you want to be.

We need to talk about business relationships, social media, and writers in the Age of Trump. I myself was a reluctant Trump voter once Ted Cruz dropped out of the primary, and I’ve been a conservative for over twenty years. Trump does some things I like and some things I don’t like. He’s a politician, so he’s automatically suspect; the lionization of politicians, people who want control over how you live, is one of the more disturbing elements of modern society. Most fiction writers are not conservatives. Most call themselves progressives, independents, or moderates. However they’re labeled, it’s clear that they’re anti-Trump. This doesn’t bother me; I came to my political beliefs through research and careful consideration, and I owe fealty to family, God, and country in that order, not a politician. I’m quite familiar with the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution; I’ve read The Federalist Papers, several books by 17th century philosopher John Locke, Charles de Montesquieu’s On the Spirit of the Laws, and similar texts to deepen my understanding of how, on what, and why my country was founded. I hope you’ve done something similar.

Social media-fueled political division has scoured our collective skin to its most sensitive layer; Twitter and Facebook are filled to the brim with angry people wielding scalpels and bile every hour of every day. This collective rage, bleeding into hate, isn’t even personal any longer. We’ve just rubbed each other raw for so long that the slightest touch draws blood and fury in equal measure. We can talk about how we got here another time, but we are here, so we’re just going to have to live with it.

If you voted for/supported Obama in 2008 and 2012, you’re no doubt terribly unhappy with 2016’s presidential results. This is entirely understandable. However, if you’re honest, you have to acknowledge that you had it pretty easy during the Obama years. Nobody seriously challenged you or what you believed. Every news outlet, save one, venerated Obama as a man who could do no wrong. The entertainment class, save for a tiny handful of actors, worshiped him. You achieved universal healthcare, nearly unrestricted immigration, the erasure of the War on Terror, and many other progressive policy gains. Even if you had your problems with Obama, it’s undeniable that the arts, particularly the literary scene, have been owned by progressives for decades. Several decades. Progressives still control it. Stephen King and J.K. Rowling, arguably the most popular authors writing today, are vocal progressives, always eager to stick it to Trump, his supporters, and his voters at every opportunity.

And yet Trump won. It’s upsetting. I get it. This buffoon, this crude, baby-handed ogre is representing us around the world, to our utter humiliation. Stupid, evil, pussy-grabbing Donald J. Trump is the President of the United States, to the cheers of every racist, sexist idiot across the country. Your disgust at such an unacceptable state of affairs needs an outlet. You’ve got to vent.

The great news is that it’s pretty safe to vent when you’re a progressive/independent/moderate writer. You’re in the majority, so you’re always going to find an audience for your loathing of Trump and his moronic supporters. It’s a way of bonding with other writers, most of whom are like-minded.

Other writers don’t make up the majority of your customers, however. At least, they shouldn’t. Readers do. And, like it or not, there are at least as many Trump-voting readers as there are Trump-hating readers. You never lose readers because of what you don’t tweet.

Now that we hate each other so much, consider what posting the next “Trump’s a KKK Member” meme does: it insults the people who voted for him by painting them as racists. And it binds his supporters to him that much tighter. Not only that, but it’s unprofessional. If you’re trying to make money, why alienate half your customer base? I’m not doing business with anyone who insinuates, infers, or implies that I’m a racist/sexist/bigot/homophobe, and neither should you.

This is not a cry for mercy; you do what you have to in the Age of Trump. In fact, I like it when you call me a racist or a Nazi because of who I voted for; knowing how small and angry and hateful you are makes me happy. Your contempt delights me. I don’t typically choose who I buy from based on ideology, but I’ll be damned if I buy books from or work with someone who goes out of his way to tell me how evil I am. You are not Stephen King. You can’t afford to alienate your customer base. He can. He’s made his fortune. You haven’t.

Conservatives in the arts don’t have to make a big thing out of not buying your books or writing for your press. We just won’t participate. When you hate us, we hate you right back. Selecting your colleagues and customers on the basis of ideology over ability is not the behavior of a serious writer.

The bottom line is that nobody gives a shit if you hate Trump. There’s no courage in expressing your banal, cheap loathing for such an easy and obvious target. Nobody gives a shit if you like him, either. Just try not to be stupid enough to call your customers idiots/racists/bigots for voting for him. You might increase sales.

The terrific people at Taliesin Nexus were kind enough to photograph the event, and sent me some relevant pictures.

Here I am holding forth while David Angsten looks on, likely hoping I’ll shut up already.Peter, one of my mentees (L); Yours Truly (C); David Angsten (R)Yeah, I don’t know what I’m smiling at here, either.If you look closely at the lower right you’ll see my zombie book on the same table as real books like Michael Walsh’s The Devil’s Pleasure Palace.

As the weeks flew by and I received manuscripts from the writers I would mentor, the specter of Hurricane Irma rose in the Caribbean, heading straight for my home state of Florida. Every day I checked the projected paths, spaghetti models, and weather forecasts, all of which said the same thing: Irma was coming, and if I attended the workshop, I would be leaving my wife and son to face the storm alone. Despite this, Mrs Dubrow, who is easily the most capable person I know, insisted I go.

So, heart in my mouth, I went.

We had been preparing for such a storm for years: our house is situated in a non-evacuation zone, which means that it’s the sort of place you want to evacuate to if there’s any risk of flooding. We had landscaped in such a way as to minimize the danger of trees crashing through the roof (trees on our property, anyway), and we had acquired plenty of water and food if everything went to pot. And, best of all, we live close to a hurricane shelter in case the gale drives our neighbors’ tree limbs through our windows. While it’s impossible to prep for every contingency, we were ready.

And yet, I worried.

As for the workshop, it was a transformative experience. There’s nothing like teaching others the fundamentals to keep you yourself learning, and in between mentoring sessions, a number of brilliant and successful writers gave panel discussions, like Adam Bellow, Robert Bidinotto, Ann Bridges, Nick Cole, Andrew Klavan, and Ken Lizzi. David Bernstein of Liberty Island led a discussion on marketing and sales. Michael Walsh was the keynote speaker. Best of all, I met my friend David Angsten face to face at long last; David, another panelist, recommended me for this gig, and he’s one of those rare people you like more and more the better you know him. I was also privileged to meet Andrew Malcolm of Hot Air, as well as some other columnists whose material I had read and enjoyed over the years.

Irma hung over everything. In the layover between connecting flights to California, the airline canceled my flight home, days in advance. The hurricane was scheduled to hit the west coast of Florida late Sunday night, and all models projected it to rampage over my very neighborhood in its path along the state. I was helpless to do anything but worry and pray, like most Floridians, but I was the one who fled and left his family behind (a silly thought, but it’s one of the things that occupies one’s mind in anxious moments). Because I didn’t know when I might be able to get home again, I arranged to fly to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, figuring I’d stay with my older brother and his family until I could catch the next flight to Tampa. I spent Sunday night in an agony of worry until I heard from my wife, who told me that the electricity had gone out but everyone was fine.

Imagine my relief.

Once the storm drifted north, the airport opened again. The earliest flight I could get would take me halfway across the country to Dallas, Texas. Then, after a four-hour layover, from Dallas to Tampa. Not fun, but compared to what people in the Florida Keys and the Caribbean were going through, it was nothing. First-world problems. During that time, my wife and son checked into a hotel near the airport, because it’s next to impossible to live without air conditioning in Florida. My Dallas to Tampa flight was delayed four more hours, and I wasn’t reunited with my family until four o’clock in the morning that Friday.

Three days later (eight days after the storm blew out our power), electricity was restored to my house. We were among the last in the county to get power back. For us, the disaster was over.

As the things I learned, saw, and did in L.A. sort themselves into the various corners of my mind, I find myself overwhelmed by gratitude.

Western culture has become so addicted to outrage that every disagreement, no matter how minor, can become a permanently alienating conflagration. How this came to pass is the subject of another discussion; suffice it to say that there are many elements involved, and as much as we’d like to place the blame at the feet of our ideological opponents, this is one problem that we’ve all contributed to. Social media’s influence on communication is a major factor, from email to Facebook to texting to Twitter. When you contrast that with how important body language is in communication between individuals, you can see the inherent problem with our technological society: we’re all outraged, we’re all talking, and we’re all missing a huge component of what we say to each other. Tone, gesture, and expression are lost in words displayed on a screen, and yet we speak to each other in this format all the time. So it’s no wonder that we’ve become so alienated, so stressed, so divided.

This alienation has become so acute that even business owners have become comfortable telling potential customers that they’re not welcome if they don’t adhere to a certain political viewpoint. On the writer’s side of things, Stephen King mocked every Trump voter as an imbecilic buffoon. These men are wealthy. They don’t need your business. But they’re also major contributors to the outrage culture that divides us. Not because it’s good business for them to do so, but because it pleases them to do so. They can afford to alienate you.

The vast majority of writers don’t have that status. We have to write, market, sell, and build fans through hard work. Even those of us who are more traditionally published.

A symptom of this outrage culture is the tribalism that comes with identifying as a member of a certain group. You’re a moderate. You’re a progressive. You’re a conservative. You’re a Berniebro. You’re a NeverTrump conservative. You’re an independent. You have your tribe and the people from other tribes are your enemies. So who you voted for becomes a defining characteristic, even though it shouldn’t be. You know deep down that not only are you larger than your politics, most everyone else is larger than their politics. And yet you have a tribe.

I write about current events often, and because our outrage culture uses politics as its chief bludgeoning tool, current events collide with politics all the time. There’s no point in avoiding it, even if I were so inclined. What I don’t get into are the conflicts over presidential politics. I didn’t do it during the Obama years, and I won’t do it during the Trump years, however long or short they may be. Such discussions are always pointless.

You may be of the opinion that approximately half of the United States knowingly voted for a reprobate. That Trump’s a racist who employs white supremacists and bigots and homophobes. And you’re comfortable saying so, even though you’re tarring the president’s supporters with a horribly ugly brush; after all, if they voted for a racist, they must be racist, too. Or maybe they’re just stupid. As a writer, as a seller of your words, is telling half your audience that they’re idiots and/or racists the best sales pitch?

Believe it or not, there’s nothing on this planet less risky, controversial, original, edgy, or witty than calling Trump a racist or buffoon. The majority of your writer friends will agree; most writers tend to be on the left end of the political spectrum. You’re in good company. You’ll get retweeted, Liked, and lauded by your fellow scribes. Good for you: you’ve signaled your feelings to the tribe. You’ve expressed your just outrage and made your buddies happier for it.

For everyone else, those writers and readers who don’t agree, or who are just plain sick of the intrusion of divisive political rhetoric into what is, for most of us, an escape, you’ve alienated us. Nobody wants to read, let alone work with, someone who implies that he’s a racist and/or an ill-informed bigot.

Presidents should never be above reproach, criticism, or ridicule. Mature adults must be able to handle that and more, particularly when it’s aimed at their favorite politician. But it doesn’t mean they have to like it, and it definitely doesn’t mean that they will gladly pay for the privilege. I read fiction from writers I disagree with all the time. But once those writers descend to the ugliness of tribalistic name-calling based on something so stupid as a political difference, I’m done with them. I’m under no obligation to use my limited time on this planet to help someone who’s implied I’m a bigot sell books.

How many writers have you heard of who were kicked off of a project for having a left of center political viewpoint? My guess is that the number’s vanishingly small. Now flip it: how many writers do you know who were kicked off a project for having right of center politics?

Well, you know one: me. I was kicked off the writing staff of the horror site Ginger Nuts of Horror for expressing, in my own space, a political viewpoint that millions and millions and millions of other people share. I bring this up not as a “woe is me” lament, but to point out the silliness of our outrage culture. That’s where we are: tribes. And if you’re in the wrong tribe, you’re out. You’re an unperson. For similar stories, check out Nick Cole. Or Kevin Strange. Or David A Riley. It happens rather a lot on one side and not on the other.

Even if the tribalism doesn’t bother you and the outrage gives you that dopamine hit you need to get through another paragraph, another page, another day, the smart thing to do as someone who wants to sell more books is to not insult your audience or colleagues. You need them both.

I’m three short chapters away from completing the first draft of the third book in the Armageddon trilogy. It’s a massively difficult task to bring everything together in a way that satisfyingly completes both character and story arcs, which is why it’s taking so long. And the first draft is so horrible I’m not even sure I can bring myself to look at it to work on a second draft. As we say in the video business, “We’ll fix it in post.” Anyway, the end is in sight. The story of angels, demons, psychics, Nephilim, witches, and ordinary people living in extraordinary times is drawing to a close. The series titles in order are:

After this series, I’ve got tentative plans for a more traditional Urban Fantasy series. And, perhaps, something more science fiction-oriented.

Because I don’t have enough to do, I’m also contributing to a short story anthology. This is a collaboration effort with another writer, and will focus on near-future science fiction along the lines of my short story Hold On. Stories about next week as opposed to next year, focusing on the cultural and social changes we’ve instituted, and where they might lead. Plus some very strange stuff I’m really looking forward to writing. You want to be entertained? Provoked? Amused? Horrified? It’s in there. More details will become available when we’ve got the foundations laid a bit better.